Time

Friday, September 27, 2024

Memorial of Saint Vincent de Paul, Priest

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Time

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Dad took naps at 1 pm for 20 minutes, whether under the tractor or lying face down in bed with his work shoes hanging over the edge. I take those naps too. When I don’t my body tells me, STOP!

Most mornings I have already planned my day. When I wake up I recall that plan and wonder how and if it will happen. Do I need to make revisions? Do I need to build a timetable, starting at the end and working backward? Sometimes that is helpful.

However, often the Greek word kairos (time) is what I mean rather than the other Greek word chronos (time). Kairos signifies a proper time for action. Chronos refers to the sequence of seconds, minute, hours, and days within which we are born and within which we die.

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up.

Dad’s relationship with plants, like every farmer, governed much of his life. Plants take time. They need to be seeded, cultivated, and harvested, and if we miss any of the right times, they suffer.

A time to kill, a time to heal. A time to tear down, and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Seventeenth century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (often called the last “universal genius”) believed that time exists as an infinite dimension outside of our own space. “Why did God choose to create the world at the ‘right’ moment’? God might have waited forever, yet in one particular moment He created us and everything we see. How does that apply to his creation of time?”

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather them. There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a tine to be silent, and a time to speak.

We cannot not think in terms of time. Even the word “always” is a time word. Still, the psychological word “flow” refers to a melting together of action and consciousness, with a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time. In those moments I am unaware of time passing.

There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Think and ask “in the beginning,” when God created time – did God put himself inside time, just as he put himself inside our world as a human being in Jesus? But temporality is a limitation of the creatures God made – not God. Just as Jesus was not influenced by sin, so God is not influenced by time.

Here an alternative thought from Nir Ziso:

In His interaction with temporal beings, God has condescended to engage with time. There must be a timeless/eternal character in God, but once He brought into being the world of true temporality, he would have engaged with the world and its history. We may even call this mercy, as it were an act of divine self-limitation, almost like entering a matrix, where even God has to play by the rules.

The Bible’s reminder that one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day – that is not just for God, but for us. This relativity makes possible our ways to relate to time personally. In our brief moment of time we look back, we look forward, we remember, we anticipate, we live, we die.

There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.

This poet-philosopher casts a wide net into human experience.

What do workers gain from their toil? But he has made all things beautiful in their own time.

Lord, let me satisfied by my daily bread, by my daily toil, by my daily life. Forgive my ambitions for immortality. Let me see what you have made me to see.

God has set eternity into the human heart, but still no one can fathom what God has done from the beginning until the end.

Day by day.

(Ecclesiastes 3, Psalm 144, Mark 10, Luke 9)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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